While promoting her new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown Forum, June 2006) on the June 6 editions of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes and MSNBC's The Situation with Tucker Carlson, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter continued to bash both liberals and family members of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Coulter asserted that Jesus would say that “we are called upon to do battle” on liberalism. In criticizing family members of 9-11 victims, Coulter asked: "[D]o I have to kill my mother so I can be a victim, too?"

Hannity & Colmes

When asked by Hannity & Colmes co-host Alan Colmes whether “Jesus [would] sanction a book that belittles and ridicules a large segment of the American population,” Coulter replied, “Yes.” In defense of her claim, Coulter cited the "money-changers passage" as evidence, stating that “liberals always think of Christ as, you know, some pantywaist. No. We are called upon to do battle.” Coulter also stated that “the general compulsion of liberals [is] to free criminals,” and explained her theory of how the liberal “religion” has used its “obsession with Darwinism” to “replace[] sanctification of life with sanctification of sex and death”:

COULTER: Well, it is an entire cosmology, a view of the world, beliefs in the supernatural. I do think, something I don't get to until the end of the book, that at the root of the lot of it is -- is their obsession with Darwinism and the Darwinian view of the world, which replaces sanctification of life with sanctification of sex and death. Sex and death. That's how you get improvement in the species. And allegedly, the new species, which they've never been able to produce.

Then, as she had done during an interview with host Matt Lauer on the June 6 edition of NBC's Today, Coulter again criticized 9-11 widows, stating that “nobody likes being lectured by a victim” and asking: "[D]o I have to kill my mother so I can be a victim, too?"

In addition, when asked by Colmes to respond to accusations by elections officials in Palm Beach, Florida, who alleged that she might have committed voter fraud, Coulter replied: “I think the syphilis has gone to their brains.”

The Situation with Tucker Carlson

During her interview with host Tucker Carlson -- who claimed the new book is “reasonable; it's very smart” -- Coulter reiterated her claim that liberalism is “a godless religion” that “infects the schools” and “baptiz[es]” children “in the religion of recycling and condom use.” She continued with additional attacks on liberals:

• I mean, as I say at one point in the book, you never run into a fundamentalist Christian as intolerant of -- take anything, you know, homosexuality -- as a liberal who has just found a lit cigarette in a nonsmoking section.
• They tend to cite the Constitution or science. But in both cases, the Constitution or constitutional never refers to the actual Constitution; it just means what liberals like. The same thing with science. I have a whole chapter on liberals', really, repulsion from science because science isn't subject to their hysterics and crying jags, whether it's on breast implants, stem-cell research, the fact of IQ.
• Well, they are a church. It's separation of our church and state, not their church and state.
• And I must say, I sort of feel sorry for gays being the last ones at the sexual-revolution window. We've had liberalizing rules on divorce. We've had the sexual revolution. We've had, you know, the pill and burning bras and rampant premarital sex and polymorphous perversity. And 30 years later, gays come to the window and say, “We'd like our little slice, too,” and suddenly, the nation erupts in rage. So I do feel sorry for them for that, but I don't like the rest of that stuff either. And I think that's what this is a reaction to.

She also told Carlson that the widows of victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “demand that we listen to them out of pity,” and that they should “take their money and shut up about it.”

As Media Matters for America has noted, Coulter has a history of inflammatory and offensive rhetoric.

From the June 6 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes:

HANNITY: All right, your first cable interview. I was watching you with what's his name on the Today show, Matt Lauer, little tense there on the set.

COULTER: A little tense. It was a great interview. It's much better than being asked to describe the book. You know, that's always the hardest in the first week, because you don't have the chapters summarized yet. Arguing, I can do.

HANNITY: We just had on -- your book reminded me, Ann, of a topic we were just discussing. I see Mrs. Souers, who we just had on this program, and how can you not just want to cry for, a, what this woman has gone through --

COULTER: Right.

HANNITY: -- this father is going through, and also what this girl went through.

COULTER: Right.

HANNITY: And then we're just beginning to get the record of this guy.

COULTER: That's right.

HANNITY: You have an entire chapter in here and you talk about Willie Horton.

COULTER: Yes, and the general compulsion of liberals to free criminals. I mean, it is stunning how predictable it is. I was thinking the same thing sitting back in the green room. This guy has been -- I don't know the details. I don't know if you reported them, but on these sex crimes before -- but I can assure it wasn't a conservative legislature, a conservative judge releasing these guys. It's the same thing over and over again. I mean, one case I have is Arthur Shawcross, who was released by [former New York governor Mario] Cuomo's parole board -- this was many years ago -- after he had sexually molested and murdered a little girl and a little boy. After 15 years in prison, he was released. He was secretly moved to a town where the police were not even notified he was going to be there. In the next few years, he murdered 11 women. I mean, it's predictable that this is going to happen again and again and again.

COLMES: You know, [President] George [H.W.] Bush 41 pardoned drug dealers and drug traders, all presidents have pardoned. So, you know what? We can play a game of who is worse on criminals. You say your Christianity fuels everything you do --

COULTER: Oh, yes. That's my Human Events interview.

COLMES: -- everything you write, and that you're called upon to battle cruelty. You said that to Human Events. Would Jesus sanction a book that belittles and ridicules a large segment of the American population?

COULTER: Yes.

COLMES: Jesus would? Where would Jesus -- can you point to the passage where Jesus would approve of that?

COULTER: Well, there's the famed money changers' passage, which is my favorite, probably a favorite of Sean's, as well. I mean, liberals always think of Christ as, you know, some pantywaist. No. We are called upon to do battle.

COLMES: Wait, wait, wait --

COULTER: And, by the way, this is not a book about Christianity. That was an interview I did.

[crosstalk]

COLMES: What liberal said Christ is a pantywaist? Can you name who that is?

COULTER: No, this naming names things -- you're not getting me into.

COLMES: Because you talk in broad categories. I'd like to know who specifically.

COULTER: I do talk in broad categories. This is a book about liberalism.

[...]

COLMES: You're talking about godless liberals not having values, not being values people. In light of that you've been in the news a little bit lately, accused by election supervisor Arthur Anderson of Palm Beach of voting in the wrong district and not answering a registered letter that they sent to. And they say that you might have committed a felony. So could you address those charges and tell us what happened?

COULTER: I think the syphilis has gone to their brains.

[...]

COLMES: Let's talk about what you said in your book about the 9/11 widows, when you mentioned briefly in that earlier interview today. You accuse them of using their husbands' deaths to speak out. Didn't George W. Bush use their husbands' deaths to grab executive power and start a war in Iraq, which was not a threat to 9/11?

COULTER: No, he has executive power. He's the president.

COLMES: He broadened it, some would say unconstitutionally.

COULTER: You can say whatever you want. He's the president. He is in charge of running foreign policy under the Constitution of the United States.

COLMES: You've actually attacked women, bereaved women, and you call them sobbing hysterical women.

COULTER: I don't attack them for being widows. I attack -- I simply do not believe that having your husband die entitles your left-wing views to sanctification.

COLMES: They're not all left wing. In fact many of them are Republicans and voted for Bush.

COULTER: It is the most vulgar thing. Yes, until then.

COLMES: Yes, that's right.

COULTER: We always hear about Damascus Road conversion. I'm sure they were. No. This is, I think, a serious point. The liberal -- and it's a chapter in my book on liberal infallibility. I think it's one of the most vulgar things liberals have done to discourse in America.

COLMES: These women are not liberals. They're women who spoke out.

COULTER: This personal authenticity to have a position on something. What, can I not talk to you about, you know, discrimination against Jews? Can you not talk to me about women in America?

COLMES: No one's stopping you. No one's stopping you. This is the broad platform we have.

COULTER: Do I have to kill my mother so I can be a victim, too?

COLMES: But Ann, these women are not liberals. They're women who spoke out.

COULTER: They're always put in forward -- no, they say they need to be listened to, and we can't respond because they're victims.

COLMES: But you call them grieving, sobbing --

COULTER: Nobody likes being lectured by a victim.

COLMES: Do you think calling them sobbing hysterical women when these women had their husbands blown up by terrorists shows due respect to these grieving widows?

COULTER: You're leaving out the entire point of why they are even in the news and we're being -- and we're talking about them. They injected themselves into the public debate. They're giving interviews, and press conferences on public policy, on the response to 9/11.

COLMES: Yes. They get to speak out.

HANNITY: Let me move on here. I guess now we're going to accuse the president of using widows for -- is that what I'm hearing?

COLMES: I don't know. Alan doesn't know that the president already has executive authority. That's why he's called the president.

HANNITY: Let me ask you this. One of the most provocative chapters. This is a provocative book. You only write provocative books.

COULTER: Thank you.

HANNITY: And you hit hard, because this is what you believe. And I want you to explain this, the chapter, “The Holiest Sacrament, Abortion.” We don't want to talk about abortion it seems like any more in America.

COULTER: I think -- I think we may be at the point where the abortion ladies are finally going to be thrown off the boat. But they are the last ones the Democratic Party are going to throw out. I mean, it is striking that Bill Clinton, the last -- the last Democrat that the Democrats have been able to trick the American people into putting in the White House, sold out basically every Democratic special interest group but one. He vetoed the partial birth abortion ban twice, which was passed by overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate. It's a gruesome procedure. It's opposed by vast numbers of Americans. I mean, it's like the death penalty in that way. And he vetoed it twice. That tells you how important abortion is to the Democratic Party.

HANNITY: I've been looking for it -- you're going to be on my radio show tomorrow. We're going to be at a Book Review in Huntington doing a live radio show, and anyone can come see us, by the way.

COULTER: Except Alan.

HANNITY: No, Alan's welcome.

COLMES: I'm disappointed I wasn't in your book.

COULTER: Sorry.

HANNITY: But one of the points that you're really making as you read the entire book and you're saying godless, the church of liberalism. What you're saying is that there is a moral foundation to the thinking of the left. And I want you to explain that in a little more detail, because you go into great detail in the book. But explain the philosophy behind this.

COULTER: Well, it is an entire cosmology view of the world, beliefs in the supernatural. I do think, something I don't get to until the end of the book, that at the root of the lot of it is -- is their obsession with Darwinism and the Darwinian view of the world, which replaces sanctification of life with sanctification of sex and death. Sex and death. That's how you get the improvement in the species. And allegedly, the new species, which they've never been able to produce.

HANNITY: Talk a little bit about yourself, because to have -- because I share most of your views. And I'm having a hard time -- except your review of my book, which I did not like. But I share...

COULTER: I thought you were too nice to liberals.

HANNITY: I share a lot of your views. But I want you to explain to everybody what is the foundation of Ann Coulter? Because a lot of people, when I mention your name to liberals they melt. You are like Alka-Seltzer in water. They bubble, fizz, give off their energy. You are the Antichrist to them. Who is -- what is the Ann Coulter? Where does your philosophy come from?

COULTER: Well, that's the toughest question I'm probably going to get on the book tour. As much as I don't like talking about myself, I'm a Christian, and everything comes from being a Christian. Everything I do, I mean, from the interview that Alan was just reading from to “Human Events”. I mean, I do think Christianity fuels all of my books, because you are called upon to behave in a certain way as a Christian, and that is to fight lies, injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy. That fuels everything.

From the June 6 edition of MSNBC's The Situation with Tucker Carlson:

CARLSON: Joining me now live from New York to explain, Ann Coulter. Ann, welcome.

COULTER: Hello, nice to be here.

CARLSON: We think of liberals as less religious than conservatives. And all surveys of voting behavior bear that out. The more often you go to church, the more likely you are to vote Republican. Not a pejorative statement; just a fact. How is it that liberals, as you say, are every bit as religious as conservatives?

COULTER: Well, it's a godless religion. It bears all of the earmarks, often the less attractive earmarks of the ways they attack religion, the hysteria, the intolerance, the self-righteousness. I mean, as I say at one point in the book, you never run into a fundamentalist Christian as intolerant of -- take anything, you know, homosexuality -- as a liberal who has just found a lit cigarette in a nonsmoking section.

CARLSON: I can verify that that's true. So without God, though, I mean, there are no absolutes, right?

COULTER: Right.

CARLSON: I mean, it's easy to that something is absolutely good or absolutely bad unless you appeal to a higher authority, whether it's real or not. So how is it people who tend not to believe, at least in your telling it, in absolutes are absolutely convicted of certain things?

COULTER: Right. No, that's right. It is a godless religion. It's basically set up in opposition. It's the opposition party to God. Where liberals derive their self-righteousness, I don't know. They tend to cite the Constitution or science. But in both cases, the Constitution or constitutional never refers to the actual Constitution; it just means what liberals like. The same thing with science. I have a whole chapter on liberals', really, repulsion from science because science isn't subject to their hysterics and crying jags, whether it's on breast implants, stem-cell research, the fact of IQ.

CARLSON: You're talking about secular liberals, and I tend to agree with you that -- that --

COULTER: Oh, yes, and the Summers. Remember the reaction to [former Harvard University president] Larry Summers' remark.

CARLSON: Right.

COULTER: Science is something that you have facts. They can be tested. They can be checked. Heterosexual AIDS, another one.

CARLSON: Right. But what about -- what about religious liberals? I mean, there are many, and I know some authentic religious liberals, people who believe in Christianity or Judaism, who are also politically liberal. What do you make of them?

COULTER: I think they're lapsed liberals. Good, welcome aboard.

CARLSON: So there's no room for a kind of legitimate disagreement on religion? There are people in my own church, the Episcopal Church, who I don't agree with, but I think are genuinely trying to be Christians. But they're screaming lefties, who you know, summer in Vermont and all that. But I think they're for real when they say they're Christians.

COULTER: I don't know who you're talking about. And this --

CARLSON: Sure you do. Imagine the stereotype.

COULTER: Well, OK, but I'm not -- let's not personalize this. I'm not talking about specific liberals the same way. I mean, you can describe Christianity and you can also describe liberalism. Christianity has certain beliefs, tenets, doctrines. Not all Christians are always living up to them. Similarly, not all liberals are living up to the tenets of liberalism. But there is a vector. There is a movement. You can describe certain aspects to this religion of liberalism, which advances, which infects the schools, has school children for six hours a day, 12 years of their young lives in baptizing them in the religion of recycling and condom use. But a moment of silence, that's banned, and that is banned because of the alleged separation of church and state. Well, they are a church. It's separation of our church and state, not their church and state.

CARLSON: Well, speaking -- speaking of the intersection of politics and religion, gay marriage, obviously an issue that has gotten a lot of press in the last two days. But I wonder, though, about the conservative argument for gay marriage, and there is one, and it's this.

That marriage is a civilizing force in society. People are more productive, happier citizens when they're married. And that gay people, once given the opportunity to get married, will, in fact, be happier, more productive citizens. And in fact, it's conservatives who allow people to make lifelong commitments. What do you make of that argument?

COULTER: It's -- it's an argument. I don't buy it, and apparently, the American people don't buy it. I mean, ultimately, you forget the reason for an institution that's been around for 3,000 years. But ultimately, the purpose of marriage is to transmit civilization to the next generation. There has never been an institution that does it as well as marriage, and that is marriage between a man and a woman. And I must say, I sort of feel sorry for gays being the last ones at the sexual-revolution window. We've had liberalizing rules on divorce. We've had the sexual revolution. We've had, you know, the pill and burning bras and rampant premarital sex and polymorphous perversity. And 30 years later, gays come to the window and say, “We'd like our little slice, too,” and suddenly, the nation erupts in rage. So I do feel sorry for them for that, but I don't like the rest of that stuff either. And I think that's what this is a reaction to.

[...]

CARLSON: Ann Coulter joins us tonight live from New York. Ann, welcome back.

COULTER: Thank you.

CARLSON: “Enjoying their husband's deaths so much.” I understand your point about just because you're a victim doesn't make you an expert but enjoying their husband's death so much is an awful thing to say.

COULTER: I think its true, and I think this is something liberals do all the time. It's an ugly way to...

CARLSON: You think it's true that these women are enjoying -- A lot of these women are left with children, and their husbands were killed on 9/11. I mean, gee.

COULTER: So were hundreds of other widows but they weren't cutting campaign commercials for Clinton, and they weren't going around demanding commissions.

CARLSON: But enjoying their husband's death is prima facie so nasty that it discredits what I think is a pretty good book.

COULTER: The point is, why -- why can't we hear these half baked liberals bromides from Howard Dean? Why do liberals always choose spokesmen like the Jersey girls, like Cindy Sheehan, like Joe Wilson who because of some personal aspect of their life we are not allowed to respond to?

CARLSON: I absolutely agree. And to some limited extent, you see it, you know, on both sides. John McCain, nobody is questioning him on matters of war, for instance. But no, I get your point and I agree with it completely.

COULTER: I don't think [inaudible] compares to McCain at all, and I'm not a fan of McCain's.

CARLSON: Maybe it doesn't. But I want to just focus in on this reoccurring problem that I think you have. I read a lot of your book, 300 pages long. I think a lot of it's reasonable. It's very smart. I agree with the vast majority of it.

The headline tomorrow, however, will be confined to your exchange with Matt Lauer and that single sentence about the widows enjoying their husband's deaths so much. And people who know people who perished on 9/11 or average Americans are going to think Ann Coulter is a whack job and a bad person, and I'm not buying her book. And I'm not listening to her ideas.

Isn't that self-defeating to say things like that?

COULTER: I guess we'll see by my book sales. I don't think they will say that. If people are going to use personal a tragedy in their lives to inject themselves into a national debate, I'm sorry. You can't just say, “We're off limits. Oh, now we're going to invoke the fact that our husbands died and you can't criticize us.”

They were specifically using their husband's death and there were hundreds in fact thousands of widows.

CARLSON: It doesn't mean they were enjoying it. Their husband's gone, and their kids are there and geez, it's depressing.

COULTER: And so are the thousands of widows who are not cutting campaign commercials for Clinton. These women got paid. They ought to take their money and shut up about it.

If they want to take about something else, that's fine. But no, people going out and citing some family tragedy so that they can give us what Howard Dean could have given us, what Hillary Clinton could have given to us. But then saying, “Oh, but you can't respond.”

CARLSON: This is a liberal talking point, but there is an element of truth to it, and it's this. The president himself has leveraged 9/11 in ways that are legitimate and also in ways that are vulgar, in my view. The 2004 Republican convention, doubtless, you were there. I was there.

It was using -- that whole convention was using 9/11 to political effect. And as someone who was sympathetic to most Republican ideas, I was terribly offended by that. Were you offended?

COULTER: Well, you might be offended. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm talking about. He is the president. He is in charge of the executive branch. He is the commander in chief.

CARLSON: But Rudy Giuliani did it. The whole Republican Party does it.

COULTER: It is his job. Yes, and that was their job. You think FDR didn't run on the war? That's their job.

CARLSON: Of course, he did. But he also interned Japanese-Americans. I mean --

COULTER: Bush was not saying I knew somebody who died.

CARLSON: Right. Right.

COULTER: That's completely different. To invoke your personal experience. And liberals do that all the time in order to shut down the debate, and it's an ugly part of American politics.

CARLSON: I do think that this president and his party have used 9/11 in a similar way to shut down debate, particularly in the early days of the Iraq war. And the notion was if you're opposed to the Iraq war or even have hard questions about it, then, I don't know, you wouldn't mind another 9/11. And that offended me as someone who did have, as a traditional conservative, a real conservative, who had questions about the war in Iraq.

COULTER: I've got to say, I don't see the connection at all. The president arguing about what his response to the war on terrorism is going to be is not the same as weeping widows using their husband's death to inject themselves into the national debate and demand that we listen to them out of pity.